Description
There’s a beautifully sick simplicity to the eye-poppingly grisly new Thai horror film Hell, a loose remake of the 1960 Japanese film that shares its name: it begins with an attractive young cast of media professionals, each facing romantic problems and/or fitting into cozy genre stereotypes (the clown, the drunk, the snob, etc.), and just when you think the story will proceed along the well-worn path of having each character meet or evade fate… Hell has them all die en masse when their van is crushed by a truck, and the rest of the film is spent entirely where all of you Fantasia fans are headed: straight into the deepest pits of hell, kids! Yes, the unlucky seven are all killed and thrust into the Buddhist version of eternal damnation, which the movie renders as a sort of Bosch canvas colliding with a 1980s Italian Conan rip-off, or Coffin Joe meets The Bride With White Hair in a Frank Frazetta painting: grunting barbarians torturing agonized sinners amidst a landscape of gnarled trees and colorfully lit caves (and we do mean torturing: some of the gory bodily injuries inflicted on hell’s captives are not for the squeamish). Hope is not entirely lost, however, as it materializes that a couple of these hellbound souls have been inadvertently placed there when they are actually just in limbo, and they must find their way home.

With a fire-and-brimstone ferocity that almost makes the film feel like the cautionary Buddhist equivalent to a Left Behind-styled Christian apocalypse tract, Hell (produced by acclaimed Bang Rajan director Tanit Jitnukul) is a lavish, FX-heavy spectacle that still manages to shock. A reminder for your post-screening party: the longest suffering is reserved not for thieves or adulterers, but alcoholics, who apparently gargle boiling oil for 8,000 years. So, is that second martini really worth it?